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Speed up builds and scripts, remove duplicate entries in $PATH. Users scripts are oftern bad: PATH=/apath:$PATH type of thing cause diplicate.

Show current pathname in title of terminal
This helps to keep track of what is going on when you have several tabs open in your terminal. The title automatically changes when you change directories.

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file

Rename files in batch

Show interface/ip using awk
Interfaces like lo can be omitted from the beginning, there are probably better ways of doing this, i'm a noob at awk.

Use xdg-open to avoid hard coding browser commands
I rarely use the system menu to start applications. I use keyboard shortcuts instead. Keyboard shortcuts are convenient time savers. To configure the shortcuts I use gconf-editor or CompizConfig Settings Manager (if I have Compiz turned on). Lately I've been using Chromium as my browser. Since Chromium is under heavy development it occasionally becomes unusable and I have to switch back to Firefox. I was hard-coding the browser command in my keyboard shortcuts. This became problematic with frequent browser hopping. I now use the xdg-open command when defining my keyboard shortcuts. xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. In the metacity keybinging_commands I have xdg-open http://gmail.com where I used to have firefox http://gmail.com. Now when switching browsers I don't have to update each keyboard binding command I just change my default browser in Ubuntu by clicking through the menu: System / Preferences / Preferred Applications / Web Browser. xdg-open is more convenient for this browser hopper.

Rename files in batch

cd up a number of levels
Instead of typing "cd ../../.." you can type ".. 3". For extremely lazy typists, you can add this alias: alias ...=".. 2" ....=".. 3" - so now you can write just .... !!! NB the .. function needs to be "source"d or included in your startup scripts, perhaps .bashrc.

video thumbnail gallery
thumbnail gallery of video using totem

Recompress all files in current directory from gzip to bzip2
Find all .gz files and recompress them to bz2 on the fly. No temp files. edit: forgot the double quotes! jeez!


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